Microsoft will be presenting some very interesting stuff at the PDC this year. One of the much-anticipated Oslo-related messages came last week, ahead of the conference, with the public announcement of "Dublin", an Application Server and host for WF / WCF applications. And get this: There will be CTP BITS available for .NET Framework 4.0 and Dublin ......

Service Pack 2 is now available for Commerce Server 2007. No features have been added, but a lot of product compatibility and some bug fixes: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Virtualization Windows Vista SP1 .NET Framework 3.5 support (nice!) IIS 7.0 in both classic and integrated Pipeline Mode Documentation updated Updated Starter Site Here is a complete ......

The amazon.com web site has been unavailable since around 11:20 am PST with a "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message and nothing else. It is possible to access the site through https://www.amazon.com, but not through http. Were they hacked or attacked or sabotaged? In this day and age of redundant hardware it is hard to believe that an Amazon would ......

Join my colleagues of the Magenic Technology Council (MTC) at the first annual Technology Summit in Chicago on June 20, 2008. This geeky, two-track, day-long mini-conference is packed with great sessions and keynotes by Rocky Lhotka and Jay Schmelzer, Group Program Manager on the Microsoft Visual Studio team. In the Developer track, members of the MTC ......

Recently, while getting fired up for a family Rockband session, our XBox died. Red ring of death. Put down the guitar controller - the third one nonetheless - first one got its strum bar stuck, second one had a miscalibrated tilt sensor - and go through the routine... call, ship, wait. We'd only done it three times in the last two years, so yes, we ......

I recently put together a glossary of common security-related terms to aid in discussions around "Single Sign-On" scenarios. I've experienced this a few times now -- a level-set on terminology is almost always needed to make security discussions productive from the start. Oftentimes the terms are confused, misused, or ambiguously defined. I have attempted ......

Adding references to WCF services is trivially easy with Visual Studio 2008, but if you're still working with 2005 there are a few things that need to be considered when referencing WCF services instead of using Add Web Reference. The following step-by-step is meant to help particularly those who have not developed WCF services but just need to consume ......

Here's an easily misinterpreted error when consuming a WCF service that's hosted in IIS (vs. a self-hosted service): The content type text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 of the response message does not match the content type of the binding (text/xml; charset=utf-8). If using a custom encoder, be sure that the IsContentTypeSupported method is implemented properly. ......

I finally switched to Vista the other day, which also meant that I lost my blog settings in Word. I just spent much more time than I felt necessary to find the API URL and so here it goes the info again for the record: Login to your geekswithblogs administration screens | Options | Configure, and check the box "Allow Web Service Access". Open Word and ......

This is great news! There is a lot of very good documentation available on planning for capacity and availability planning for SharePoint Server. But Microsoft has not been idle. They have been working on a set of tools and models for SharePoint Capacity Planning, now in Beta. The tool can be downloaded from the Microsoft Connect site if you are a program ......